The EA earnings report for Q1 2019 is in the bag with the gaming conglomerate reaffirming its support to "the live service for Anthem". EA's Andrew Wilson admitted that the game had not lived up to expectations but said, "We believe in the team at BioWare, and we also believe in what they set out to achieve with this game -- building a new IP and melding genres to reach a new audience."
Wilson further revealed that players have spent over 150M hours playing Anthem since it launched and that the community is pleased with "the beauty and expanse of the world".
However, we’ve also heard feedback from our community about issues that began to manifest as the game reached scale, and that they want more depth and variety in the mission modes of the game. The team is now very focused on continued improvements to the game, and will then bring more content updates and in-game events that will enhance and expand the Anthem experience.
When Blake Jorgensen took the stage, he revealed that "net bookings were $1.36B" up from last year and driven by Apex Legends and sports titles, "offset somewhat by Anthem".
In the Q&A portion, Wilson said that the way EA will deliver games and about how games are marketed will need to change in the future.
It's not just about changing the development process in the game, is not just about changing the QA process in the game, although both of those things are being changed dramatically inside of the organization right now.
But it also comes down to changing how we launch games and how we rolled out and you should expect we'll start to test things like soft launches, the same things that you see in the mobile space right now and it also comes down to changing how we communicate with players. And our entire marketing organization now is moving out of presentation mode and into conversation mode and changing how we interact with players over time.
Read the full transcript of the earnings call at Seeking Alpha.
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